genetic changes whatsoever. The Pueblo Indians in the Southwest of the United States, for example, are known to contemporary observers as peaceful, religious, unaggressive, cooperative peoples. Yet not so long ago they were known to the Spanish governor of New Spain as the Indians whotried to kill every white settler they could get their hands on and who burned every church in New Mexico, together with as many priests as they could lock inside and tie to the altars. One need merely recall the astonishing flip-flop in post-World War II Japanese attitudes toward militarism, or the sudden emergence of the Israeli survivors of Nazi persecution as the leaders of a highly militarized society, to grasp the central weakness of the
war as human nature
argument.
Obviously it is part of human nature to be able to become aggressive and to wage war. But how and when we become aggressive is controlled by our cultures rather than by our genes. To explain the origin of warfare one must be able to explain why aggressive responses take the specific form of organized intergroup combat. As Ashley Montagu has warned us, even in infrahuman species killing is not the goal of aggression. There are no drives or instincts or predispositions in human beings to kill other human beings on the battlefield, although under certain conditions they can easily be taught to do so.
War as politics
. Another recurrent explanation of war holds that armed conflict is the logical outcome of an attempt of one group to protect or increase its political, social, and economic welfare at the expense of another group. War occurs because it leads to the expropriation of territory and resources, the capture of slaves or booty, and the collection of tribute and taxes—“To the victor belong the spoils.” The negative consequences for the vanquished can simply be written off as a miscalculation—“the fortunes of war.”
This explanation makes perfectly good sense in relation to the wars of history, which are primarily conflicts between sovereign states. Such wars clearly involve the attempt on the part of one state to raise its standard ofliving at the expense of others (although the underlying economic interests may be covered up by religious and political themes). The form of political organization which we call the state came into existence precisely because it was able to carry out wars of territorial conquest and economic plunder.
But band and village warfare lacks this dimension. Band and village societies do not conquer territories or subjugate their enemies. Lacking the bureaucratic, military, and legal apparatus of statehood, victorious bands or villages cannot reap benefits in the form of annual taxes or tribute. And given the absence of large amounts of stored foods or other valuables, the “spoils” of war are not very impressive. Taking prisoners and making slaves of them is impractical for a society that cannot intensify its system of production without depleting its resource base and that lacks the organizational capacity to exploit a hostile, underfed labor force. For all of these reasons, the victors in pre-state wars often returned home carrying a few scalps or heads as trophies or with no spoils at all—except the right to boast about how manly they were in combat. In other words, political expansion cannot explain warfare among band and village societies because most such societies do not engage in political expansion. Their entire mode of existence is dominated by the need not to expand in order to preserve the favorable ratio of people to resources. Hence we must look to the contributions of warfare to the conservation of favorable ecological and demographic relationships in order to understand why it is practiced by band and village societies.
The first such contribution is the dispersal of populations over wider territories. While bands and villages do not conquer each other’s lands the way states do,they nonetheless destroy settlements
war as human nature
argument.
Obviously it is part of human nature to be able to become aggressive and to wage war. But how and when we become aggressive is controlled by our cultures rather than by our genes. To explain the origin of warfare one must be able to explain why aggressive responses take the specific form of organized intergroup combat. As Ashley Montagu has warned us, even in infrahuman species killing is not the goal of aggression. There are no drives or instincts or predispositions in human beings to kill other human beings on the battlefield, although under certain conditions they can easily be taught to do so.
War as politics
. Another recurrent explanation of war holds that armed conflict is the logical outcome of an attempt of one group to protect or increase its political, social, and economic welfare at the expense of another group. War occurs because it leads to the expropriation of territory and resources, the capture of slaves or booty, and the collection of tribute and taxes—“To the victor belong the spoils.” The negative consequences for the vanquished can simply be written off as a miscalculation—“the fortunes of war.”
This explanation makes perfectly good sense in relation to the wars of history, which are primarily conflicts between sovereign states. Such wars clearly involve the attempt on the part of one state to raise its standard ofliving at the expense of others (although the underlying economic interests may be covered up by religious and political themes). The form of political organization which we call the state came into existence precisely because it was able to carry out wars of territorial conquest and economic plunder.
But band and village warfare lacks this dimension. Band and village societies do not conquer territories or subjugate their enemies. Lacking the bureaucratic, military, and legal apparatus of statehood, victorious bands or villages cannot reap benefits in the form of annual taxes or tribute. And given the absence of large amounts of stored foods or other valuables, the “spoils” of war are not very impressive. Taking prisoners and making slaves of them is impractical for a society that cannot intensify its system of production without depleting its resource base and that lacks the organizational capacity to exploit a hostile, underfed labor force. For all of these reasons, the victors in pre-state wars often returned home carrying a few scalps or heads as trophies or with no spoils at all—except the right to boast about how manly they were in combat. In other words, political expansion cannot explain warfare among band and village societies because most such societies do not engage in political expansion. Their entire mode of existence is dominated by the need not to expand in order to preserve the favorable ratio of people to resources. Hence we must look to the contributions of warfare to the conservation of favorable ecological and demographic relationships in order to understand why it is practiced by band and village societies.
The first such contribution is the dispersal of populations over wider territories. While bands and villages do not conquer each other’s lands the way states do,they nonetheless destroy settlements
Similar Books
